To examine the social and economic impacts of the next Grand Solar Minimum – See About

Steven Goddard has a very interesting post at Real Science on the lack of sea level rise since 2002. Is this decline a pending ice age indicator?

The most sophisticated sea level satellite is Envisat. It doesn’t show any sea level rise since it was launched in 2002, so our friends in the sea level community tried to hide it by painting it almost invisible yellow and not normalising the data properly.

Steve has an animation that shows the corrections and shows how completely bogus the claimed sea level rise trend is.

4 thoughts on “Hiding The Inconvenient Satellite Sea Levels | Where is the water going?”

R. GatesOctober 17, 2011 / 9:05 pm

Excellent questions Russ. Would need to go back and take a look more closely at the data to see when the net evaporation from the oceans began to exceed the volume replaced by melting glacial ice and thermal expansion. And it is not just evaporation from the oceans, but where that evaporation occurs in relationship to prevailing wind and storm tracks. Most water evaporated falls again as rain over the oceans (leading to no net rise or fall in ocean levels. But if the evaporation occurs near a land mass with the prevailing winds carrying that moisture over land to be deposited as rain or snow, then that would represent a potential net decline in ocean levels. As Greenland and Antarctica are still losing net glacial mass, the the only explanation for the lowering of ocean levels is that water is moving to land areas (as shown clearly on GRACE) and some thermal contraction through a period that is favoring La Nina.

One final thought, and I’m sure you know this…during La Nina episodes there is net gain of energy to the worlds oceans (as less is lost to the atmosphere). This is clearly reflected in the tropospheric temperatures. We know that there is not less solar insolation to the oceans, so since there is less loss to the atmosphere, there must be a net gain to the oceans. This will of course be released back during the next El Nino. Expect a good sized one by 2014 at the latest.